She needed three steps to turn herself around, then she led us through the back door. The next room had a single desk and a huge boiler in the far corner. When Sherisse closed the door, I saw the jail cell.
It was only about seven feet by four feet. Inside was a bare wooden bench that someone had taken from a picnic table. Penny lay on the bench, her face slack. She was dead. One glance told me that.
Little Mark sat slumped in the corner. He was dead, too. Within the confined space of the cell, he was as far from his mother as he could be.
“My God,” Ford said. “What happened?”
“I thought they would want to be together, so when I brought Little Mark here, I put him with his mother. He didn’t seem to mind, but they didn’t even talk to each other. They wouldn’t even look at each other.”
Ford cleared his throat. “Honey song, how did they die?”
“Well, Penny started yelling at me, but it was all gibberish. Her left arm was hanging at her side like she couldn’t move it, her left eye was partly closed, and she started drooling. My Auntie Gertie had a stroke while she was teaching me to make piecrust, so I knew what was happening. I called 911 right away, but it was already too late. They were both … like this.”
“Strokes?” Ford said. “Well, Little Mark did bump his head.…”
“But both at the same time?” Sherisse said.
She was right. That wasn’t a coincidence. “Have they had any visitors?” I was suddenly sure that Pratt had killed them both with one of his sigils, just to be careful.
Sherisse seemed surprised by my question. She glanced behind her. There were two doors beside the cell: one had a sign that said RESTROOM hung on it, and the other was unmarked. She had glanced at the unmarked door. “No one that has anything to do with Penny or Little Mark.”
“That’s good,” I said. “Who?”
Ford cleared his throat. “If Sheri says—”
I lunged between them, stepped up onto the chair, and jumped the desk. Neither of them reacted quickly enough to stop me. I rushed to the unmarked door and yanked it open.
The next room was dark, lit only by the glow of a small television.
The sudden light from the opened door made them all turn toward me. “Momma?” the smallest one said, but when he saw it was me, he turned back to the show. The sound was very low, and I realized that there were six or seven more kids bundled up in blankets and sleeping bags on the couch and carpet.
The child who looked oldest said: “It’s you!” She jumped to her feet and came toward me. It was Shannon, the girl who had apologized for hiding from us. Staring up at me, her expression hidden in shadow, she grabbed hold of my wrist. “Did you kill it?” she asked. “Did you?”
“I’m sorry, but no. It got away from me. But I haven’t given up. I’ll keep after it.”
“Please,” she said.
“That’s enough now,” Sherisse said, and pulled me out of the doorway. “Shannon, this is the last video, okay? I need you to be the big girl and get the rest of them to sleep a little. Okay? Will you do that for me?”
“Please,” Shannon said to me. “There’s no one else I can ask. No one is listening. Please.” She looked at Sherisse then, without saying anything else, and went back into the darkened room. Sherisse shut the door.
Ford’s phone rang. He answered it, moving away from us.
I lowered my voice so no one but Sherisse could hear. “How many kids are in there? Is Shannon the oldest?”
“She is. There are nine in there right now. Most of them, their parents just vanished. They don’t answer their cells, and no one knows where they are.”
I was about to tell her to prepare for more when Ford cut in. “All right,” he said in a sharper tone than I’d heard before. “That was Steve. You and I have to go right now.”
I shrugged and followed him out to the cars.
We drove back toward the fairgrounds yet again, but well before we got there, the pickup turned onto a feeder road. Fallen trees made it looked blocked and abandoned, but Ford led me around a sudden turn and I followed him uphill.
The pickup was big enough that I couldn’t see the road ahead, just a high back fender and cargo net. We turned sharply and drove up a switchback trail for another fifty yards or so before pulling into a small field. Steve’s Crown Vic was parked at the far end, and there were two burgundy BMWs and the Maybach beside him. Ford pulled in behind Steve, blocking him in, but there weren’t many other spaces left. I parked at the entrance, blocking everyone in.
The field wasn’t very large, but it was tremendously muddy, even by Washaway’s standards. To the left was a large log cabin with a shake roof. I’d have called it rustic if it hadn’t been painted fire-engine red. A few dozen yards behind the cabin the mountains rose straight up for several hundred feet.
The front door swung open and Steve strode out. He moved quickly, but he looked tired. I was already walking toward him when he waved me over. As I slipped between the BMWs, I glanced inside. They were empty.
Before he could say anything, I called: “I don’t know if they told you, but I found more dead bodies at the campground, and one woman who was near death. I haven’t heard an ambulance, so you might want to have it checked out. One of Regina Wilbur’s people, a woman named Ursula, shot up the place.”
“Thank you for telling me. After we finish here, I’ll head over there to look into the mess you … found.”
For a moment I thought he was going to say
